Photographic retouching studios that work in fashion and editorial are usually cagey about the work they get up to. While car and beer brands are usually happy for studios to show the craftsmanship that goes into compositing elements together for a billboard or magazine spread, the fashion industry likes to pretend that those shots you see were created in-camera – not Photoshop.

So it's great to see these four videos from New York-based Rare, whose clients include luxury lifestyle magazines and brands from Vogue and Harper's Bazaar to Tiffany and Tom Ford.

Of course, the work these time-lapse videos feature by Rare's founder Elizabeth Moss aren't likely to be from big brand campaigns – but the work on show is impressively crafted. The video above shows the most in-depth work – six hours of retouching condensed to 90 seconds – with the videos below showing 90 minutes and four hours work, plus a montage of different projects.

Comments

Steven said: I saw this same article on Cosmo (no, I wasn't reading that rubbish, it came up in Google Alerts) and they called it "unrealistic", "scary" and "changing the essence of a person".Incredible how they can dismiss such skill so easily, yet those who know exactly how much work goes into this work can appreciate the years of practice, incredible eye for small detail and insane levels of patience that go in to just one image.